Think Like a Futurist E-Book

Cecily Sommers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Push past resistance to discover and own new business territories Think Like a Futurist shows how to track changes, explore questions, and engage in new thinking that connects today's pressures with tomorrow's realities. Cecily Sommers shows how to apply long-term focus and strategies to needs as diverse as industry forecasts, innovation challenges, leadership development, or future-proofing a brand. By understanding intersecting potentials that one day may impact your organization, you can readily spot emerging trends and market shifts, uncovering opportunities on the horizon. Think Like a Futurist explores such questions as: Where will new markets emerge over the next 5-10-25 years? What will be the big issues of the day? How will lifestyle, social mores, and policy adapt? And what role do we play in that future? * Offers a clear framework for thinking like a futurist, and direction for how to integrate it in high-pressure corporate environments * Explains how the social, economic, and environmental crises of our time spring from just four constant and predictable forces * Reveals the three dramatic disruptions on the horizon that should be a part of every strategic conversation * Written by Cecily Sommers the Founder and President of The Push Institute, a non-profit think tank that tracks significant global trends and their implications for business, government, and non-profit. Filled with tools and models for a new world, this book should be required reading for strategists and innovators across disciplines. "Refreshing. A book that does not follow today's push to be 'innovative' just to snag attention because of the current hot trending keyword. Matter of fact, Cecily Sommers' book works to get us away from simply identifying and going for a ride on the latest trend(s) in our respective industries. Quite the contrary, rather than avoid a scientific or tactical discussion of trend identification, she works to give us the ability to go beyond trends and into the future. Cecily has drafted a book providing a nice blend of practical reality, philosophy, and practical execution. It speaks well to current discussions about how to drive 'innovation' or, better, creativity within your businesses--however large or small. All in, this is a book 254 pages long, including index, that is written at a practical level that, after closer study following an initial read-through, provides a methodology for anticipating the future and taking action to meet it. Provides a methodology for anticipating the future and taking action to meet it. Think Like a Futurist is a good read for anyone struggling with how to move their organization forward. Business leaders, product and program managers, service providers will all find the concepts Cecily introduces to be well laid-out with a reasonable amount of supporting content."--The source is a blog: href="http://jtpedersen.net/2012/11/15/what-ive-read-lately-think-like-a-futurist/">http://jtpedersen.net/2012/11/15/what-ive-read-lately-think-like-a-futurist/

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Matter

Introduction

Know

New

Do

Think Like a Futurist

Part One: Know—The Four Forces of Change

Chapter One: The Four Forces of Change

Chapter Two: Resources

Chapter Three: Technology

Chapter Four: Demographics

Chapter Five: Governance

Part Two: New—The Zone of Discovery

Chapter Six: Higher Learning

Remembering the Future

Re-Perceiving the Future

Chapter Seven: Phase I: Define

Best Questions

Who are You? Where are You Going?

Who is Virgin?

Where is Virgin Going?

Chapter Eight: Phase II: Discover

Four Forces Scan

Like That!

Pour and Stir

Play and Make

Dream and Scheme

Chapter Nine: Phase III: Distill

Maximum Value Scenario: R3OI

Now-to-Future Portfolio

Plan in Reverse

Chapter Ten: Who Are You?

Define

Discover

Distill

The Best-Laid Plans

Chapter Eleven: Where Are You Going?

Clicks's History

Define

Discover

Distill

Part Three: Do—The 5 Percent Rule

Chapter Twelve: The 5 Percent Rule

Chapter Thirteen: Tinkering: The Genesis of General Mills's Idea Greenhouse

PUSH: A Catalyst

Ninety-Nine Percent Perspiration

The First Movable Piece

Tinkering. Again.

From Philosophy to Practice

Idea Greenhouse: Structure

Building “to Tolerance”

The 5 Percent Rule

R3OI

“Do Diligence”

A Culture of Futurists

The Idea Greenhouse Legacy

Conclusion

Part Four: What's Next Toolkit

The Futurist's Mind-set

Drop Assumptions and Agendas

Practice Curiosity and Courage

Save “How” for Last

Be Comfortable with Ambiguity

Suspend Judgment

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Finding Fault (Blame)

Arguing with Reality (Denial)

Needing to Know the Answer (Fear)

Focusing on Busyness (Avoidance)

Whining (Inaction)

Feeling Stuck (Resignation)

Notes

Introduction

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 8

Chapter 10

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2012 by Cecily Sommers. All rights reserved.

Jacket design: Adrian Morgan

Author photo: Christopher Everett

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sommers, Cecily, 1961-

Think like a futurist : know what changes, what doesn't, and what's next / Cecily Sommers. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-14782-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22585-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-23917-9 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-26382-2 (ebk.)

1. Business forecasting. 2. Strategic planning. 3. Diffusion of innovations. 4. New products. 5. Creative thinking. 6. Organizational change. I. Title.

HD30.27.S68 2012

658.4′0355 — dc23

2012026748

To my familyfor teaching me thatan interesting lifeis what comes from havingan interest in life.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.

—Chinese proverb

Introduction

Picture this: after a long day's work, you return to your hotel room—an underwater suite with glass walls that transform into computer screens—and fall onto your bed, famished. You don't have to call room service. Instead, you grab your cell phone, touch a few keys, and hop in the shower. By the time you come out, you can smell your dinner—a Kobe beef steak, cooked medium rare, and broccoli rabe sautéed with red wine vinegar and garlic—printing out from the FAB Hub on your bedside table. After dinner, you check your message notifications, and are fascinated by a photograph of an enormous cockroach that a friend has sent from Madagascar. You could use some company, so, using the FAB Hub, you print out a 3-D cockroach robot, complete with six clicking metal legs and two wire antennae. Your new pet isn't an exact replica of the one that freaked out your friend; on a whim, you've given it a green Mohawk made of rug fibers, and the ability to sing on command. All you want now is a slice of hot apple pie fresh out of the printer. Can you smell the cinnamon in the air?

Can you see the future on the horizon?

If not, your resistance probably isn't prompted by an aversion to sweets or cockroaches, or what your kindergarten teacher unkindly referred to as your lack of imagination. The fact is, the future I've described is closer than you think. (The straight-out-of–Star Trek FAB Hubs are already being used to generate human tissue for medical purposes.) But you are hardwired not to believe it, or even imagine it. Here's why: according to the most recent brain-imaging research, the same neural networks we use to envision the future are also used to recall memories. That means that most of us can only imagine what we already know.

Considering that prediction is the primary function of the brain and the foundation of intelligence, this biological efficiency can be seriously limiting. Our neural networks want what they want: certainty. This is a benefit of our wiring: it helps us feel prepared for the future, in control and confident. In short, it nurtures our sense of stability. But the future could not care less about our biological comfort zone.

What happens when an unstoppable force (the future) meets an immovable object (our brains)? The end of the world as we know it. The fallout from a failure to imagine on the part of corporate America can be devastating. Remember the 1990s tech darling AOL? Its merger with Time Warner was supposed to create the future of global media. Instead, the two companies remained stuck in their corporate cultures, resulting in a failure to meet the future that cost shareholders more than two hundred billion dollars. Or GM? The company had a head start on electric and hybrid vehicles, but decided to abandon its march forward in favor of lobbying government to keep energy regulations in line with the past. For both companies, the collision of the unstoppable force of the future with their unmovable corporate vision created crisis.

Were our brains wired differently, we would be more able to imagine the future as something other than a linear continuation of the past. The fact that we are biologically predisposed not to see what is coming is cold comfort. Just ask the thousands of autoworkers still looking for a job in Detroit, because their corporate leaders steered their companies into the future using the rearview mirror on a gas-guzzling SUV. Understanding our biology is not an excuse to accept it as destiny; it is an opportunity to push past our natural neural limits—in other words, to get unstuck.

This is what futurists do: we get people and organizations unstuck from what I call the Permanent Present, the natural bias for projecting current conditions out into the future. Over the years, I have worked to reverse that bias with such companies as American Express, Best Buy, General Mills, Kraft, Motorola, Nestlé Purina, Target, Yahoo!, and other billion-dollar conglomerates seeking strategic foresight for success into the next millennium, as well as with mom-and-pop shops passionate about moving a long-standing family business into the next generation. No matter the size, product, challenge, or character of the corporation seeking help, I have encountered one constant: the push required to get clients past thinking in the Permanent Present is so strong that it feels literal. That is why I named the Minneapolis-based nonprofit think tank that I have spearheaded for several years the Push Institute.

The most public project of the Push Institute has always been its annual conference, PUSH, in Minneapolis. It brings together innovative minds from business, governmental, academic, environmental, artistic, religious, musical, and other disciplines across the globe in order to teach corporate clients how to think innovatively.

I am continually amazed—and, frankly, frustrated—that more than a century after Thomas Edison said that the innovative process is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration, so many people still believe that creativity is a gift: either you have it or you don't.

I knew better by the time I was ten—working up my own perspiration at a ballet barre.

A dancer for more than twenty years, I lived most of my life in a studio. Each day followed the same routine: ballet class in the morning, followed by afternoons spent making and rehearsing new works of choreography, culminating in a production, then back again to the barre. Even when I was faced with a bad performance, review, or injury, the drill continued: learn, create, produce; learn, create, produce. Our creativity was a structured process of perspiration.

I applied the same disciplined approach to innovative thinking in phase two of my professional life. Fascinated by the systems of the human body I studied in dissected cadavers in anatomy class, I hung up my ballet shoes in my late twenties for a career as a chiropractor. Over the years, working with Western, Chinese, and homeopathic traditions, I realized that no system was in itself “right” and that I had to borrow from each to come up with a useful diagnosis. In the decade I spent teaching anatomy at the University of Illinois and Indiana University, I tried to instill the core lesson to my students: back away from ideology and look to see how the facts fit together; that is where the insight lies.

It is this quest for insight that has defined my career, from dancer to chiropractor to futurist. And as much as the experience and theoretical knowledge I have accumulated along the way has influenced how I think about strategy, it has also convinced me of four simple truths: the creative process can be taught to anyone; it can be scaled for groups of all sizes; it follows a clear, replicable structure; and, in the end, a lot of hard work, not magic or even the right DNA, is what wins the day.

The question is, how? It was just this challenge that the cellist Yo-Yo Ma touched on in a tribute to one of the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, Apple visionary Steve Jobs. In the 2011 Entertainment Weekly year-end special, Ma wrote that the two friends often spoke of “The importance of stimulating disciplined imagination in our students to ensure an innovative workforce.”1

The fact is, in the wake of the tech boom of the 1990s—and inspired by the success of Apple as well as renegade start-ups like eBay, Napster, and Google—corporations of all sizes are already sold on the need to inject the “soft” stuff of creativity, innovation, and collaboration into their businesses. But putting everyone in open work spaces, urging employees to play Ping-Pong and be courageous, and exhorting executives to find their inner maverick in an effort to “Innovate or die!” or “Fail forward fast!” (to quote just two catch phrases of the day) are meaningless moves unless they come with specific instructions and fit within a specific strategy.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When clients come to me, they can feel that they are spinning in place. Often they say something like this: “Okay, we get it: creativity in the workplace is important. Collaboration is a good thing. Innovation leads the way to growth and differentiation. Now, tell us how we go about doing those things in specific steps. Show us how we can do this and still meet earnings expectations for next quarter. Give us a way to nurture the free flow of ideas that doesn't waste time, talent, and money. Bottom line—show us exactly what we need to know and how to implement it in our organization.”

The purpose of Think Like a Futurist is to close the gap between talking about the role of creativity and innovation in business and integrating them into standard business practices—in concrete terms that hold up no matter what New Economy the gurus say we are experiencing: the Creative Economy, the Knowledge Economy, the Experience Economy, the Post-Industrial Economy, the Social-Capital Economy, the Information Economy, the Bottom-Up Economy, and on and on. Yes, thinking like a futurist is partly about seeing coming trends, but it also means transcending trends. To think like a futurist is to adopt a wide-angle perspective on any issue you face. You must develop your ability to step outside the particulars of your situation and ask, “How does this work?” Which is to say, before you can get practical, you have to get philosophical. That means you have to step back from the situation to frame your challenge in terms of who you are and where you're going; to understand the context of your challenge from a systems point of view, in regard to change in the environment, the human system, and the organizational system; to formulate what I call Best Questions that focus you on the real need; to expose yourself to new thinking and experiences; to formulate a vision; and, finally, to create a plan for action.

In Think Like a Futurist, I will show you how to integrate the hard-to-prove, hard-to-manage capacities of foresight and innovative thinking in three steps: Know, New, and Do.

Know

The first step in thinking like a futurist is to examine the world in which you operate. In Part One, you'll learn that the social, economic, and environmental crises of our time spring from just four constant and predictable forces that always have, and always will, structure our world. The four forces of change are resources, technology, demographics, and governance. I will show you how to familiarize yourself with them in order to get a big-picture perspective on any challenge you may face. Understand how they work together to drive change, and you will be able not only to avert crises but also to uncover ideas and opportunities for your future along the way.

New

The hardwired functions of the brain are what govern the subjective human experience. If we want to learn to think like a futurist, we have to first understand how our brains are designed to do what we refer to as “thinking,” a conscious process by which we make sense of our world so that we can make good decisions. The left-right-left exchange between the left and right hemispheres of the brain describes how we form predictions, a capacity known as foresight.

This is where a futurist begins.

I call the problem-solving methodology I use to kick-start your futurist thinking the Zone of Discovery (ZoD). It is based on the newest brain science related to learning and creativity, easily adapted for use in strategy and innovation, questions big and small, opportunities far and near.

In Part Two, I'll introduce you to some ZoD exercises and activities that follow the neurological pattern of left brain–right brain–left brain activity that is associated with innovative epiphanies. A progression of steps stimulates new ways of thinking and seeing that, when mixed with inputs from outside sources and experts, reveal opportunities to connect your present to the fast-approaching future. By selecting those opportunities that help you become more of who you are and get closer to where you're going, you can craft solutions and turn them into action-ready projects.

Do

Most organizations don't know how to integrate short-term and future thinking without sacrificing productivity. Further, most assume they don't have the time. I assure you, they do. In Part Three, you'll learn the 5 Percent Rule: a way to incorporate future thinking into a standard organizational system that requires no more than 5 percent of your time and resources. The 5 Percent Rule is an approximate measure of investment of time, talent, and money required to ensure that futurist thinking thrives in a business environment. You will learn to manage the alignment of short- and long-term projects, making your life easier and your work smarter and more efficient.

The idea bears repeating: the work of the futurist is to make your work smarter and more efficient, to offer a discipline and a structure to help you see into the future and align your company's goals with what is coming. By understanding change, you're able to lead change—again, no matter what economy the pundits say we're experiencing. Within each economy lie practices that we name in order to make sense of the change. Recent paradigms are systems thinking and design thinking. I call these mental models and will explore the ideas behind them and others in the chapters that follow. But the bottom line is this: there are laws and mechanics of change that remain constant, no matter what you call the latest thinking. It is the goal of this book to make seeing into your corporate future plain and practical—and a whole lot more effective than looking into a crystal ball. By the end of this book, you will know how to think like a futurist to achieve long-term resiliency and profit.

Think Like a Futurist

Part One

Know—The Four Forces of Change

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

—William Gibson, science fiction writer

Chapter One

The Four Forces of Change

It is important to remember that the focus of this book is on thinking, not on trends. Certainly, we'll uncover a number of trends here in Part One, but as the Four Forces Model will show, the thinking and process hold up no matter what the trend may be.

Current trends are not the purview of a futurist anyhow. Our concern is with the deep, structural forces that are constant and that cast a longer shadow on the future. In my work as a futurist, I have sought to reduce change to its most elemental components and have come up with the Four Forces Model. Just as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur are the four building blocks of all life forms, resources, technology, demographics, and governance are the four building blocks of all change. These forces generally move more slowly than trends and have a permanent effect. Because we understand the relationship among the four forces—a relationship we will examine in the following pages—we also understand that the changes they bring about occur in a fairly predictable manner. What we can't predict are their outcomes.

To appreciate how the four forces shape society, it's useful to look at human society as it was taking shape, during the time of Neanderthals, fifty thousand years ago. An archetypal depiction of this group usually shows them huddled around a fire, holding spears, either getting ready for or feeding on the results of the day's hunt. The four forces are easily identified in a scene such as this, as everything about their life is in a more elemental form: resources comprise the food and materials that nature offers; technology is represented by the spears; demographic data could be measured on the fingers of just a few members; and governance is inferred from the evidence that they've managed to create a home base that supports a group.

Over time, humans have been able to harness the power of the four forces for their own benefit. In the process, they have moved from a position of hand-to-hand combat with the forces in a battle for survival, to one of greater comfort and ease. We'll explore how the four forces have been the constants in every stage of development and how, with the exception of catastrophic events, progress has unfolded in an evolutionary manner. Our journey begins, here, with our Neanderthal predecessors.

Resources. Neanderthals spent much of their days hunting and gathering food and collecting materials, such as wood and stone, from their environment to make fire, tools, and rudimentary shelters. Their lives depended on what was readily available (or not) in close proximity. If what was at hand wasn't enough, or if the grass looked as though it would be greener someplace else, then they'd go in search of new hunting and gathering grounds.

Technology. Tools helped Neanderthals get the most out of what the environment had to offer, and transform it into secondary resources. For example, fire could transform a fresh animal into cooked, digestible food; melt hard minerals into new, moldable forms; and convert clay into pots. Each of these secondary materials introduces new capacities—improving food storage and shelter, for example—which build on one another. In this way, technology begets new technologies.

Demographics. Though often no larger than a clan of forty, early societies were also concerned with having the right demographic mix of age, gender, and genetic diversity. This is an important third category of assets, after resources and technology, for who you have on your team is the primary factor in how successful you'll be as a group. Productivity is the key. Whether it's the ability to produce more children or provide more labor, the capacity to enhance the health and wealth of the group relies on who's in the mix.

Governance. Distribution and management of the group's assets—resources, technology, and people—are administered through the rule of law and the rule of markets. Whether it is a clan of forty deciding who does the hunting, who tends the children, or how the meat is distributed, or the communist state of China mandating the distribution of resources, information, and even offspring for its 1.3 billion citizens, every society uses the rule of law and the rule of markets to adapt to a shifting landscape. And what drives those shifts? Why, resources, technology, and demographics, of course.

We may have graduated from loincloths to spacesuits and from cave dwellings to smart homes, but there's a whole lot that hasn't changed since prehistoric times. We've gained comfort, convenience, and complexity, but the four forces are still the foundation for life.

There's a hierarchy among the four forces that has also remained constant over time. Because the availability of resources is most closely related to survival, it is the foundation of the system of forces. It is also the slowest moving of the four, sometimes moving at the pace of a glacier, literally. Change in resources is affected by gradual processes—such as evolution, mineral formation, climate change, tectonic shifts—and by human activity. The exception is when, due to these gradual changes, pressure builds, then releases in a sudden eruption or weather system such as a tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane. The utter destruction waged by such events reminds us why resources rank first among the four forces. Resources can pull rank anytime; all it takes is a tsunami or earthquake to remind us which force has the upper hand.

In the hierarchy of forces, technology comes second. The tools and knowledge we use to extract and transform resources into new products and new capacities are what expand our world. Technology also expands human capabilities, giving us power beyond our physical bodies to make things, go places, and discover new realities. Something as simple as magnification in a microscope or telescope opened up an entirely new way of understanding life that shifted beliefs and morality, affected medicine and science, and allowed us to dream about worlds beyond our own.

Knowledge among humans is progressive. Technological innovation builds on what came before it, which explains why the rate of change in technology accelerates over time, limited only by our capacity to make sense of it. For instance, when stem-cell research and tissue engineering first came on the scene, the consensus reaction was, “Whoa! Wait a minute! What do you mean we can grow organs in the lab? Is this moral? Should it be legal?” So progress has slowed while we try to understand what this new capacity for genetic engineering and regenerative medicine means for our society.

Demographics are next in the four forces lineup. People are producers. We produce through our physical and intellectual labor, and we produce more people. Composition matters, too: you need to have enough working-age people to support the young and the old, and there has to be a balanced ratio of men to women to produce the next generation. Equally important is that a population be bonded to one another, value and reward cooperation, and bear some accountability for the good of the group.

That people can produce more working together than they can working individually is the foundation of social groups, but for social groups to work together successfully, there have to be explicit rules to guide and manage what groups do, how they produce, and how the assets are shared and distributed. This is the role of governance, the last of the four forces.

The first tool of governance is the rule of law, which differentiates between permissible and impermissible actions, determines who has the authority to make the rules, and sets penalties for rule breakers. The second tool of governance is the rule of markets, which rewards a group or individual according to the quantity and quality of items produced.

The structure for maintaining governance is a group's government, be it a monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, theocracy, or some other form. Similarly, there are different types of economic systems for managing productivity and rewards, including capitalism, socialism, and communism. No matter what you call it or how it works, every form of government and economic system sets the rules for its group to follow.

Of all the forces, governance is the most reactive. The rule of law and the rule of markets for a group change in response to resources, technology, and demographics.

To better acquaint you with the four forces, the following four chapters will introduce you to a number of visionary thinkers—some contemporary and some historical—who exemplify the best of future thinking in their “force field.”

Resources: Doug Cameron, leading researcher, inventor, and venture capitalist in biofuels technologiesTechnology: Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameenphone and of Emergence Bioenergy, and founder and director of MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovation as a means of achieving economic progress in low-income countriesDemographics: Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century political economist who issued a surprising warning—that the planet could reach and exceed population capacity; Auguste Comte, a nineteenth-century French philosopher who coined the phrase “Demography is destiny”; and David E. Bloom, a Harvard economist whose “demographic dividend” concept was featured in Time magazine's “Ten Ideas That Will Change the World” in 2011Governance: Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, formerly a U.S. trade negotiator and currently an adviser to the White House, global corporations, labor unions, and governments around the world on globalization and competitiveness

Together, their stories will illustrate how the social, economic, and environmental issues of our time spring from these four constant and predictable forces that structure our world. Understand how they work together to drive change, and you'll be able not only to avert crises but also to uncover ideas and opportunities for your future along the way. Signs of emerging ideas, technologies, and markets that you note and collect then become invaluable fodder for the right-brain innovation process you will learn in Part Two.

Chapter Two

Resources

It's dinnertime, and you have the option of jumping into your air-conditioned Escalade and rolling down to the local pizzeria for a ten-inch arugula and artichoke pie, or seeing whether the hunting party comes back with any fresh kill to eat. Which would you choose?

Unless you're a contestant on Survivor and there's a million dollars on the line, I'm guessing that tonight's meal will probably include the Escalade and the pizzeria. How do I know? Humans have always preferred the cushier path. History shows that we've done an excellent job of inventing tools and materials to make life more comfortable and convenient. Our pursuit of a “better” life is what drives innovation.

Long ago, the desire for a better life motivated people to invent their way out of the Stone Age and on to increasingly more elaborate and luxurious lives. Each of the agrarian, industrial, and now digital eras has been associated with an increase in the standard of living so dramatic that they are referred to as revolutions (as in the Industrial Revolution). The hallmark of these revolutions is that they represent a leap in our capacity to harness nature's energy for our own purposes, in ever more concentrated forms.

Every time there's a jump in energy concentration, as the moves from wood to coal to oil and gas reflect, new possibilities become available. You couldn't get to that pizzeria down the road in a wood-fired vehicle, for example, but with petroleum, you can get to the moon. To move up the energy ladder, we have to invent technologies, and that requires scientific discoveries. The tools and knowledge are then used in other applications—such as agriculture and building materials—jump-starting waves of innovation that bring the modern conveniences that define each era. Human progress has been propelled by one simple formula: advances in science and technology + new energy sources + imagination, paving the path from stone tablets to iPad tablets; from rarely surviving to age thirty to starting families after forty; and from figuring out how to cross oceans to figuring out how to cross the universe.

Our appetite for the even better life is an energy-intensive pursuit. The demand for energy grows as we progress, meaning that we have to continuously develop new methods of finding and exploiting rich energy sources. We've been quite successful, too: we figured out how to build dams and windmills, create drills that can penetrate the ocean floor to tap oil deposits, split atoms to release huge amounts of energy, and make petroleum-like products from genetically altered algae. Each of these innovations has enabled significant gains in human progress, and all resulted from tinkering our way to a “better” life over many millennia.

On a metaphysical level, energy is life. It is the animating force of nature and the basis of all exchanges, alive in the act of breathing in and out, the approach and retreat of ocean tides, and the cycle of birth and death.

Yet on a chemical level, these exchanges are simply nature's recycling process, in which one organism's waste is converted into another organism's food. The principle element in this dust-to-dust cycle is carbon, called the backbone of all life forms. On a technical level, the transformation of death and decay to rebirth is little more than the making and breaking of bonds between carbon atoms, reactions that absorb and release energy along the way—what is known as the carbon cycle.

All energy technologies harness the carbon cycle, extracting the energy nature produces and redistributing it to human activities. Figuring out how this can be done safely and reliably is the basis of innovation in energy technologies. And, as we know, new energy technologies lay the foundation for massive, scalable progress in every other field, which means that the tinkering that energy scientists are doing now is the seed of all future innovation. Because most of us haven't given much thought to the nuts and bolts of this life process since seventh-grade science, I am going to pause here for a little refresher course.

A CliffsNotes version of the carbon cycle might go something like this. If left unperturbed, nature manages to keep carbon in perfect balance: carbon is absorbed as CO2 by plants; plants, in turn, combine CO2 and water to make carbohydrates, a food source for animals; animals use oxygen to break the carbon bonds of carbohydrates to give them energy, leaving CO2 and H20 as waste, which feeds the plants, and so on.

The bigger story of the carbon cycle is that it continues below the surface, too. When the balance of carbon atoms exchanged between plants and animals needs to be adjusted, as happens when there are big shifts in climate or geography, excess carbon is taken out of circulation and absorbed into the ground. There, the pressure of oceans and mountain ranges gradually compacts it into denser and denser form over millions of years. Carbon from plants turns into coal, carbon from microbes becomes oil, and carbon from both plants and animals can become natural gas. These are known as fossil fuels because the energy sources we extract from oil wells and mines contain carbon atoms that were circulating on the surface during the age of dinosaurs. The bonds between carbon atoms are still “alive,” however, and release energy when their bonds are broken. And because these fossil fuels are superconcentrated sources of carbon, when you break the bonds (with fire), a lot of energy is produced.

But here's the problem: when we release carbon that isn't tied into the current life cycle carbon budget, we end up with a surplus of carbon in the atmosphere. For every ton of coal burned, for example, two tons of carbon are released into the atmosphere. There's simply not enough living matter to absorb (neutralize) the excess CO2. And when the carbon cycle is out of balance, then nature is out of balance. And when nature is out of balance, temperatures rise, soils become depleted, waters become polluted, and species die out. This is the situation we now face as a result of the massive amount of carbon atoms released into the atmosphere since humans started burning fossil fuels.

The imperative to balance the carbon cycle is not just a feel-good cry for conservation. It is an economic necessity, particularly as the planet hosts a population that is growing by billions every fifty years (more on that in the discussion of demographics), more of whom are joining the energy-intensive global economy. These pressures are speeding up innovation in energy technologies that promote greater efficiency in burning fossil fuels, methods of carbon absorption, as well as “alternative” energies derived from non-fossil-fuel sources. All over the world, people are working to figure out how to meet the increasing demand for energy while also reducing, or minimizing, excess carbon in the environment. The key is to find ways to harvest energy (carbon bonds) from the current carbon cycle, on Earth's surface, not from those cycles that were active long ago, deep in the ground.

In the category of alternative, or green, sources of energy, such as solar, wind, and biofuels, the challenge is in producing, storing, and distributing it on a scale that's large enough to meet demand. Naturally, this need triggers innovation in storage capacity, such as big batteries. Batteries that can hold on to lots of energy for long periods of time allow for advances in the electronics industry as well. The promise of these batteries also makes it possible to bring electrification to large numbers of people who live in parts of the world that are currently “off the grid.”

This is how advances in energy technologies create revolutions. What's invented in science labs for the energy industry creates brave new capabilities that are then adapted by other industries, triggering a wave of innovation across every industry. All these efforts, together, begin to shift how people live, both socially and in terms of economics. In this way, changes in energy sources and technologies beget more change, and give us a glimpse of what a better life will look like tomorrow.

Since he first cracked the code for turning a very specific mix of smelly organic gunk into plastic bottles, deodorants, cosmetics, mattresses, and a long list of other things we use in everyday life, chemical industry whiz kid Doug Cameron has been a harbinger of that better life. Figuring out how to rebalance the carbon cycle while meeting an increasing demand for energy has been Doug's life mission as a chemical engineer, businessman, and venture capitalist who has been working at the cutting edge of “clean technologies” for more than thirty years. One of his earliest contributions was discovering how to make common microorganisms such as E. coli and yeast produce a chemical that is otherwise derived from oil.

Doug began his career as a professor and research scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he made breakthrough discoveries in biofuels that are now commercially produced by DuPont. He went on to become the chief scientist and director of biotechnology at Cargill, Inc., the largest private corporation in the United States and a giant in the world of agribusiness, where he built and led Cargill's corporate biotechnology research group. From Cargill, Doug went to Silicon Valley to join the esteemed Khosla Ventures, a boutique venture capital firm specializing in “clean-tech,” before founding Alberti Advisors, a venture advisory firm focused on opportunities and challenges at the intersection of clean technology and agriculture. Today Doug is a codirector at First Green Partners, a venture group that invests in bringing “early stage technologies in the carbon value chain” into the market. Let's just say Doug knows a thing or two about what's happening in alternative energy—both in the science labs and in the business community.

As mentioned earlier, Doug invented a method for deriving a petroleum-like substance from plants. To accomplish this, he genetically engineered common organisms, such as E. coli, to generate the enzyme that converts the plant from starch to synthetic petroleum. In the world of chemical engineering, this was big stuff. Petrochemicals are used in almost every item you touch on a daily basis—the mattress you sleep on, the products you wash with, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the electronic appliances you use, and dishes, furniture, cars, paint, cosmetics, medications, electronics, asphalt, rubber, plastic, and nearly anything that's been manufactured. All of the things that make up the stuff of our modern lives have petrochemical content. If these chemicals can be derived from a plant source that is still a part of the current carbon cycle, rather than from fossil fuels, then we will have succeeded in our goal of meeting the energy needs of today in a carbon-neutral process.

So, moving around a few atoms in a molecule—a process, by the way, that took Doug more than a decade of tinkering to get just right—was good for the future of Earth. But DuPont was quick to see something else in Doug's breakthrough: future profits. It took DuPont a decade to bring Doug's brew to market, and nearly ten more years for the rest of the industry to show interest. This was a big risk for DuPont, a bet on biochemicals that no other major chemical company was willing to make; but today, as Doug says, “nearly every chemical company has a biorefinery,” and big names like Coca-Cola are publically pledging to have bottles made entirely from plants by 2020. In other words, it took more than thirty years for Doug's invention to make its way into everyday products. And it all started with a futurist's initial thinking—the radical, ridiculous, impossible question Doug first put to himself when he was a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s: “What if we could produce a petroleum-like substance from plants?”